It has long been established, and well documented within the art, that a winch and cable arrangement located integral with or adjacent to a vehicle trailer hitch assembly or coupling receiver that may be utilized to tow a heavy laden trailer to the vicinity of the vehicle ball hitch or receiver for coupling or guided into the receiver itself for coupling.
In most cases where receiver docking systems are utilized the prior art teaches the need to locate a manual or electrically operated winch to the vehicle adjacent the receiver member with the draw cable extending through the receiver member and coupled to a guide member having a hitch ball or other means for connecting to a trailer. It is generally assumed that such docking systems and the winch assembly are to be custom fitted to the vehicle by cutting and welding as necessary to accommodate the wide variety of vehicles used for towing. This is especially true in locating the winch assembly. Mounting the winch assembly in a concealed manner below the vehicle is made more complicated due to the location of the vehicle spare tire. Spare tire location also necessitates complicated hitch mountings for the vehicle receiver as well. Mounting the winch on the receiver or an extended plug-in receiver further complicates the use of a docking and latching process and increases the bulk of the hitch assembly and thus prohibits opening rear doors and poses a safety hazard. In most cases it is assumed that a self-docking winch assembly will be custom mounted beneath the vehicle and in a manner whereby the cable can be extended to pass though the receiver member. Since a docking hitch only needs a few feet of cable for coupling, it seem unnecessary to provide a large expensive cable winch for this purpose. However, it is certainly known within the art that cable winches alone may be attached to a receiver in a plug-in manner but are not known to be an integral essential element of the hitch assembly.
Further, the hitch docking process simplifies the coupling process but still requires a locking procedure, such as aligning the couplings within the receiver for insertion of a locking pin. Such pins may be lost or become bent and thus hard to remove or insert.
The prior art does not teach the use of a fully integrated unit combining a retrieval winch and cable or docking assembly in a self-contained module that can be plugged into a vehicle receiver hitch and provide for automatically locking the cable or docking assembly.